[1]
Psalm 104:24-25
King James Version
24 O Lord, how
manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of
thy riches.
25 So is this great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping
innumerable, both small and great beasts.
We were poor. All of
the other missionaries at Ikizu Secondary owned a car. We could not have
afforded to put gas in it, even had we owned one. So, we had to hitch a ride
anytime we wanted to go anywhere. From my meagre earnings I had managed to buy
an SLR camera and a 200 to 400 mm zoom lens.
We lived on the
northern edge of the great Serengeti National Park. Often on a Sabbath
(Saturday) afternoon or a Sunday, I would talk with one of the other
missionaries—never the Kings who had no sense of adventure—about what we might
do. The only real entertainment within driving distance—the Serengeti.
I would almost
always ride shotgun while Gary or Fritz or George or Dave or Bob drove. I
seemed to have a sixth sense when it came to the trackless steppe county of
Africa. Even though the grass was four feet high, and the bush and trees grew
with no pattern, I always knew the most direct route to the only ford across
the Grumeti River and the way home. There was no GPS in those days.
Upstream or downstream,
the Grumeti housed the great crocodiles and even greater hippos. We would often
risk life and limb by stealing on foot through the dense brush along the river
to snap pictures of the crocs or hippos. Of course, this same thorn brush often
hid the lions and leopards awaiting their prey. Hunters claimed you could
always smell a lion from 20 feet away by the foul smell of rotting flesh caught
between its teeth. I was fortunate not to have ever gotten that close on foot.
Every year we got reports of someone’s having been carried off by a lion or
disemboweled by a leopard.
Out on the plains we
saw the great animals, 5-ton elephants flapping their ears to drive off the
tsetse fly, tall giraffes delicately picking off the leaves from between the
vicious thorns of flat-topped acacia trees. When we were lucky, we would arrive
to experience the hundreds of thousands of wildebeest and zebra during their annual
migration towards Lake Victoria. They left the plains totally denuded of grass
and blotched with pungent manure. Then we could see the smaller animals:
warthogs running with their tails pointing straight up, maybe the sneaky jackal.
Always we saw various stately antelope that varied from the eland, as great as
a bull moose, to the terrier-size tommy (Thompson’s gazelle) with its perpetual-motion
tail.
As the sun sank
towards the lake in the west, we would drive back home, enriched by the vista
of God’s varied handiwork. Back at Ikizu, missionaries gathered as Sylvia or
Charlotte played hymns on the piano and we hand cranked vanilla ice-cream and
popped corn, renewed for a new week of endless work.
Thanks, Lord,
that we have never gone wanting and for the enjoyment we have received in spite
of periods of poverty.
[1]
https://www.exploring-africa.com/en/tanzania/western-corridor-and-grumeti-reserve-western-serengeti/south-grumeti-river
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